I got the chance to catch up with Kate, one of our EP students, and Janet, our excellent contact at Swale Borough Council, to find out how the work experience placement is going!
Straight off the bat, Kate was incredibly passionate about what she was doing. She has been tasked with producing a preliminary report into how climate change impacts housing in the Swale area, something particularly important considering Swale covers areas which are particularly vulnerable to flooding. Kate loves the fact that Swale Borough Council has an active Climate Change role which measures the impact of it on housing as it is something that not many local or national governments give notice to which she highlights as we are talking. She has been tasked with taking into consideration how the most vulnerable are affected by the impacts of climate change within the Swale region and identifying key focus points going forward to support those individuals and given freedom to work around this.
I got to ask her a few questions from here:
How has it been with Swale so far?
It’s very interesting. I’ve had some previous experience with working with the local government units. I was telling Janet last week that, save from the language, it felt similar to other local government planning meetings that I had previously attended, which is very interesting as I come from South East Asia. The issues when it comes to climate change are different when it comes to this situation and I gained a lot of insights seeing how the council works and all the stakeholders involved on the council side.
What have you been learning while working with Janet?
It’s very interesting to know that the Swale Borough Council has commitments with respects to climate change. It’s the first time that I’ve work with a local government unit with the specific title of Climate Change Officer. I haven’t heard of this role in the council in the Philippines, or even in Canterbury. It’s nice to know in the UK, specifically in Kent, there are borough councils that give importance to climate change commitments on the very local level.
Could you outline what you did last year with EP?
Last year, I was with three museums for two weeks each for work experience, so I was very busy for five to six weeks. My background is in archaeology and I studied a post-grad in law here, so I had fun with working with the three different museums, working on their heritage projects.
How have you found that shift from working in heritage to working in the council?
This year, I wanted the feel to be more policy and law related and this is the perfect opportunity to apply my theoretical knowledge of policy and law along with with my previous experience. This is a research based project and it deals with policy and it is a real world, practical situation of Swale Borough Council. I think it’s the perfect opportunity to apply my skills and my theoretical knowledge on policy and climate change is a pressing issue that’s of global importance. It’s really the perfect opportunity to be honest.
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Typically when we offer a work experience placement, it is ten days over two weeks, but Janet explained that they do things differently at Swale, they offer ten days over five weeks, especially as during the summer, there are families which go on holiday and are not contactable throughout this time and members of staff without children are on leave before the school holidays. A perfect way to liaise with a variety of different staff across the organisation.
I also got to ask Janet some questions about how it was working with Kate and EP.
How has it been going working with Kate?
It’s been great working with Kate, as with most students through EP, they are high calibre students so, supervision isn’t a big issue. What we have found in the past few years, as the brochure with offers goes out in February, we tend to keep everything very vague. It’s best to interview the students first and come up with a task which fits their skills set. When I saw Kate’s CV, I thought what could we offer her because she’s so well qualified. Having seen that Kate was very into social justice and climate change, I spoke with some other colleagues and we thought of this project and it’s a project which can be done in 10 working days. It hasn’t been too big a commitment on my part and we get a useful piece of work out of it.
What advice would you give for a student who would be looking to apply next year for a reward you are offering?
Do some research beforehand on what local government does and the area you will be working, i.e. What goes on in Swale. Some students had researched the climate change action plan and others hadn’t. It was obvious in the interviews that some of the student hadn’t even thought about what local authorities do and what responsibilities they have. Some hadn’t looked up Swale and didn’t really know anything about us. Also, stress the things that you are interested in as we have tailored the tasks to our students, almost retrofitted the offer to what the student would like to do.